1 Center for American Progress | Parallel Lives, Different Outcomes

Parallel Lives, Different Outcomes

A Twin Study of Academic Productivity in U.S. School Districts
By Robert Hanna and Bo Morris July 9, 2014
Twin studies in the social sciences are powerful tools. When we follow twins raised
in diferent places, we can explore the role that environmental infuences play in their
development compared to what is inherent and unique to the individual twins. Twins
with diferent life outcomes reveal a great deal about what factors help some people
achieve success.
Tis paper applies a similar type of research methodology to explore what happens to
similar groups of children educated in diferent school districts. In this case, our twins
are groups of students who live in the same state in similar geographies and who share
certain demographic characteristics. For this report, twin districts have very similar
sizes and they have the following in common:

Te proportion of students who are from low-income families

Te proportion of students who have limited English profciency
or are English language learners

Te proportion of students who receive instruction through individualized
educational programs
Our twin districts, however, difer in terms of per-pupil spending and revenues.
Te goal of this paper was to study twin districts and use the data culled to provide rec-
ommendations for how districts can best leverage their school funding investmentsin
other words, achieve a bigger bang for their educational buck.
Tis paper accompanies a CAP report on a much larger set of U.S. school districts, titled
Return on Educational Investment: 2014. A District-by-District Evaluation of U.S.
Educational Productivity. For that report, we compared almost 7,000 districts across
the United States in terms of their expenditures and levels of student achievement. Tis
shorter analysis builds of of that work and relies on data from 2009-10 school year. Our
analysis adjusts for cost-of-living diferences.
1
Student achievement data comes from the
Department of Educations EDFacts database of state assessment results, and fnancial
data comes from the departments Local Education Agency Finance Survey.
2
More on
our study approach is in the methodology section below.
2 Center for American Progress | Parallel Lives, Different Outcomes
Based on our in-depth look at twin districts and our subsequent analysis of the data, we
came away with the following fndings:

When it comes to education, spending does not always equal results.
Our fndings suggest thatat least when it comes to math and reading scores
money is not always spent in ways that boost those outcomes, even when holding
demographics constant. Of the more than 400 twin districts studied, we found the
higher-spending twin spent on average $1,600 more per student to educate similar
groups of students to similar achievement levels.
3
To put it more simply, some of the
districts were geting a bigger bang for their education buck than others. We also
found a number of districts that spent equal amounts of money, had the same demo-
graphics, but ended up with diferent levels of student achievement. Tis again sug-
gested signifcant diferences in productivity among districts.

There are significant funding inequities between demographically similar districts.
Districts rely heavily on local fnancial resources and that means that funding is ofen
inequitable. In the United States, a districts schools are primarily funded through
taxes on local property values, which have a lot to do with a communitys afuence.
Within each set of twins, one district typically collected on average more than $1,000
more per student from local resources, primarily property taxes. States and the federal
government generally do not fll this funding gap, and as a result, some districts have
far fewer resources than others, even though they serve similar student populations.

Districts have limited control over their own expenditures.
Districts have litle authority when it comes to exactly how funds will be spent, which
signifcantly infuences how these districts canor cannotboost productivity.
As William Crocket, superintendent of Mound Bayou Public Schools, a small rural
district in Mississippi, put it: We dont have that fexibility Its kind of a simple
budgetary thing that we have to do. We dont have that fexibility to say well do this or
we can do this and itll save a whole bunch of money.
What explains this lack of spending fexibility? First, there are strings atached to state
and federal grants, and districts must regularly demonstrate that they have indeed
spent money on allowable expenses. Second, most of districts budgets are allocated to
employee salaries and benefts. About 60 percent of districts budgets are commited to
instructional costs, which are primarily educators salaries. Tat does not leave much
room for district leaders to invest their fnancial resources in more productive ways.
3 Center for American Progress | Parallel Lives, Different Outcomes
So why are some districts more productive than others?
Te question is not easy to answer. For one, our approach to school productivity takes a
very limited view of student outcomes. Math and reading test scores do not come close
to measuring all that students should learn in school. Students should also, for instance,
develop knowledge of American history and a foreign language along with critical think-
ing skills. For another, the federal survey we used for our productivity analysis did not
include fnancial information at the programmatic level, so we could not explore how
districts difered in the programs or services that they provide.
Finally, the data we used in this analysis cannot speak to the quality of teachers in
schools. We can identify, for example, how much districts spent on activities related to
instruction, including teachers salaries, but we have no information that could help us
meaningfully distinguish between teachers in terms of their efectiveness in classrooms.
Te superintendents interviewed for this report understood this dilemma. When asked
about the relationship between spending and achievement, Robert Avossa, superin-
tendent of Fulton County Schools in Georgia, said: Tey are absolutely related, but
[only] if you are strategic in your human capital strategy. You may have more appli-
cants, but if youre not picking the right people, its not going to help kids. So weve
been very strategic about that.
Using data available from the U.S. Department of Education, we
compiled a dataset with over 7,000 K-12 districts from over 15,000
local education agencies across the county. All data on spending and
achievement was from the 2009-10 school year. In our analysis of
spending and achievement evaluations, we only include regular K-12
districts that had more than 300 students taking tests in either math or
English language arts during the 2009-10 school year. Data on student
characteristics were mostly from that school year, but we substituted
missing demographic information with data from surrounding years; for
example, 2008-09 or 2010-11.
In this analysis, we identied 424 pairs of districts to analyze from this
larger dataset. We restricted our analysis to districts with fewer than
50,000 students. We assigned districts to one of several bins in a few cat-
egoriesstudent enrollment and selected student characteristicsand
we also matched on their urban or rural designation. Districts ranged in
size and urban characteristics. See Table 1 for descriptive statistics about
the sample. Given that tests and prociency denitions dier across
states, we only identify and compare twin districts within the same
state. We distinguish between twins based on which one spends more
per student.
We refer to a twin as being more productive if it spends less money to
support the same level of student achievement.
Additionally, we also completed interviews with 20 district superin-
tendents from across the United States.
4
Most of the interviews were
conducted by phone, but two were done via email exchange. Some
superintendents were from our set of twin districts, and others were not.
During the interviews, district leaders oered their perspectives on the
relationship between spending and academic outcomes. Moreover, they
discussed what control they have over their districts spending and what
spending constraints they face from outside governing bodiesthe state,
the federal government, and school boards.
Methodology
4 Center for American Progress | Parallel Lives, Different Outcomes
From our research, a few things are clear. Perhaps most importantly, it is plain that some
districts can get more bang for their buck. We also found numerous districts that had the
same demographics and the same spending levels, but one district achieved more than
its twin in terms of student outcomes. Furthermore, we also found twin districts that had
the same achievement, the same demographics, but one of those districts spent less than
the other for the same results.
5
(Te former category was more common than the later.)
Part of the issue is that districts with similar demographics perform very similarly, regard-
less of how much they spent per student. More importantly, though, is the fact that some
districts spent at the same level but had higher achievement rates for those dollars.
Consider, for example, two suburban school districts in Michigan. Both served about
6,000 students and spent about $9,700 per student. In each district, about 30 percent of
students were economically disadvantaged. But there were signifcant gaps in achieve-
ment between the two districts measured over the same period of time. In one district,
around 80 percent of students were profcient in math. In the other district, around 90
percent of students were profcient in that subject.
Given the nature of our dataset, we were not able to identify how or why this occurred,
but it does make clear that some districts can do more with the resources that they have.
Issues of equity
Fiscal inequity has been a long-standing issue in American education. It is no secret that
some districts get more money than others based on race or wealth. Our research con-
frmed this fnding across the states. State funding systems contribute to this problem
and they do not do nearly enough to overcome diferences in local revenues.
Consider two twin districts in New York. Each district served more than 1,700 stu-
dents during the 2009-10 school year, about half of whom were economically dis-
advantaged. But one district still ended up having about $850 more per student to
spend. Te issue was the local tax base for each district, which resulted in the wealthier
districtthe one with the more afuent tax basecollecting an additional $700
per student from property taxes per year. Neither contributions from the state nor
the federal government was enough to overcome this clear and large inequity, so the
poorer district had signifcantly less money to spend than its peer. Te less-afuent
twin received less than $50 more per student from the state and a litle more than $100
more per student from the federal government.
Te superintendents we interviewed described situations where state funding had
decreased due to the Great Recessionchanges that likely would have impacted
their districts afer the year of our fnancial analysis (2009-10). Te superintendents
talked about state funding formulasand changes to those formulas over the past
5 Center for American Progress | Parallel Lives, Different Outcomes
few yearsthat do not meet their needs. Bob Hunt, superintendent of Chagrin Falls
Exempted Village Schools, a large suburban district in Ohio, described one such for-
mula change as shifing the burden to the local. In other words, state authorities faced
with dwindling budgets had placed the burden of funding schools squarely on the
shoulders of the local school district.
A lack of authority and innovation
From our study, it appears that part of the issue is that districts have very litle control
over how money is spent. One problem in particular is that money ofen arrives in the
district with strings atached. District leaders must typically allocate their state or federal
funds according to formulas that are usually based on the extent to which students are
economically disadvantaged.
6
Moreover, virtually any group that provides money to
schools, including taxpayers, places restrictions on how districts can spend money. With
that being the case, what actual power do district leaders have?
Not much, it seems. One study from education fnance scholar Marguerite Roza shows
that district leaders might have discretion over less than 20 percent of their total dis-
tricts budgets.
7
What this suggests is that the fnancial decisions many district leaders
can make have to do with specifc programs or services, rather than with the core work
of instruction and improving teaching.
In conversations regarding the twin analysis for this paper, superintendents generally
agreed with the idea that much of their budget was locked up in ways that they could
not control. Steven Cohen, superintendent of the 2,500-plus-student Shoreham-Wading
River School District on Long Island in New York, said that weve been able to do
things on the margin, but not to any great extent. Similarly, Steve Rose, superintendent
of Russia Local Schools, a rural district in Ohio, told us: To be honest, the discretionary
part from a superintendents perspective is a very limited amount of the overall budget.
In his district, Rose said that one way to save money is to have staf members share dif-
ferent roles. Im a bus driver as well, ofered Rose by way of example.
However, a few superintendents said they believed that they had a good deal of control
over how money was spent in their districts, although they acknowledged that they
did not have complete autonomy. Greg Hinshaw, superintendent of Randolph Central
Schools, a district of about 1,700 students in Indiana, put it this way: Teres obviously
some degree of discretion. I dont feel highly constrained by most of it. But you dont
spend money with total discretion anytime youre spending public funds.
Another way to understand this dynamic is that wealthier districts did not spend their
money all that diferently than their twins. Tey just had more of it. Across the board,
districts spent the greatest share of their money60 percenton instructional costs,
primarily salaries and benefts for teachers. Districts used the other 40 percent for
6 Center for American Progress | Parallel Lives, Different Outcomes
administrative, operations, and support costsfor example, salaries for district staf in
the central ofce, transportation for students, and/or tutoring. Other studies examining
district spending confrm these overall paterns.
8

Recommendations
Our study leads to the following recommendations for state education policymakers to
increase productivity:
Move away from rigid funding systems
Districts budgets are ofen locked into rigid structures that are not tied to student
outcomes. In a time of limited resources, education leaders should use this as an
opportunity to think more broadly about how districts fund education.
In order to increase academic productivity, federal and state policymakers should think
more broadly about ways to give local leaders more freedom to try new things. States
should relax requirements that lock up districts resources in ways that do not lead to
improved student performance.
Louisianas Empowering Educators initiative provides an example of how a state has
approached this issue.
9
Te states department of education has streamlined report-
ing requirements for federal and state funding and will provide technical assistance to
Louisiana districts to enable them to pool various funds or use these dollars in diferent
ways.
10
For example, Louisiana state ofcials might help district leaders use federal fund-
ing to support new activities, such as college- and career-ready assessments, where the
U.S. Department of Education has granted new fexibilities.
11

Support districts more equitably
Whatever the bundle of materials and services districts provide, students should have
equitable access to those opportunities. States that fund their schools more equitably do
so by distributing more funding to districts with greater student disadvantage. In 2013,
California implemented a new district funding formula using such an approach. Known
as the Local Control Funding Formula
12
commonly referred to as weighted student
fundingCalifornia will distribute funds to schools based on student characteristics.
In other words, California will send more money to schools based on student need; for
example, students with special education needs, English language learners, and students
from poor households or who are homeless.
13

7 Center for American Progress | Parallel Lives, Different Outcomes
Te state of California achieved this new funding approach through voter referendum
and the legislative budgeting process. Te referendum was helped by the power wielded
by Gov. Jerry Brown (D), who strongly supported the funding measure, and by previous
tax increases approved by California voters through Proposition 30, titled Temporary
Taxes to Fund Education.
14
Other states would do well to follow Californias lead.
Ensure districts spend money on what matters
It is important that districts get the biggest bang for their buck. To achieve this,
districts must:

Be held accountable for spending instructional dollars productively
It is clear that there are productivity diferences between school districts. Some dis-
tricts are geting beter results with less money. State policymakers should take a more
active role in ensuring that districts spend their dollars more productively without
restricting districts fexibility to make the best use of their funds.
One way to ensure that districts properly leverage their funding is through bench-
marking. Te Massachusets Department of Elementary and Secondary Educations
District Analysis and Review Tool, or DART, system provides an example of how a
state might approach this issue. It provides education leaders with systematic and
thorough databases to explore spending diferences among peer districts. Te DART
reports include information about employee turnover rates, student-to-staf ratios, and
academic performance outcomes.
15
Te states department of education regularly con-
ducts district quality reviews, which involve monitoring fnancial management, among
other factors, with respect to DART metrics.
16
In our larger productivity report, we
also call for states to benchmark districts with respect to their spending.

Be transparent and make valuable financial information available to the public
Clearly, the public cannot address fundamental questions about how public money is
spent on education in their states and school districts without access to good informa-
tion. Broadly speaking, there are scant data available to help education stakeholders
beter understand how district leaders spend money. Our approachpairing similar
districtsis rarely used to investigate productivity diferences.
To be sure, this level of data collection would not be easy to come by, but there are a
few states that are already doing just this sort of school-level information gathering.
Te U.S. Department of Education also continues to develop methods for collecting
information on school-level expenditures, particularly in an efort to identify inequities
across schools.
17
Te Texas Education Agencys fnancial reporting approach can serve
as a guide. In addition to listing basic expenditures, Texas Public Education Information
Management System public fnancial reports include spending information for all school
district programs, including athletics and other extracurricular activities.
18

8 Center for American Progress | Parallel Lives, Different Outcomes
Conclusion
Te analysis detailed above calls into question whether districts are spending money
in ways that increase academic outcomes. While some districts have greater productiv-
ity, others do not. Simply put, districts serving similar groups of students have similar
outcomes even with diferent levels of spending. In fact, without dramatic changes in
how school districts in the United States are organized, public education will most likely
become more expensive but not necessarily all that more productive.
19
Given the many
restrictions on how districts can use money, school district leaders should innovate ways
to increase teacher quality in order to improve student outcomes. District leaders might
be able to accomplish this through new policies such as teacher evaluation and also
more robust professional supports with the money they have.
Robert Hanna is a Senior Education Policy Analyst at the Center for American Progress. Bo
Morris is a Special Assistant for the Pre-K-12 Education Policy team at the Center.
*Correction, July 11, 2014: Tis issue brief has been updated to include additional information
about the twin sample in Table 1. Te table now provides data that inform the briefs compari-
sons across twins. Te revised analysis focuses on districts with fewer than 50,000 students. Tis
restricted the dataset by 16 districts to a fnal 424 pairs and ensured that higher- and lower-
spending twin groups were beter matched by district enrollment. Lastly, in the introduction, the
brief incorrectly summarized the ways in which the twin districts difer. Tey difer in terms of
per-pupil spending and revenues, not achievement. Te briefs original fndings hold.
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank the 20 district superintendents who took time to connect with
us by phone or email for this report: Robert Avossa, Fulton County Schools, Georgia;
Steven Cohen, Shoreham-Wading, New York; William Crocket, Mound Bayou,
Mississippi; Chris Daughtry, Central Noble Community Schools, Indiana; Kim Eparvier,
Peshtigo School District, Wisconsin; Kenneth Facin, Hoosick Falls Central School
District, New York; John Gray, Mayfower School District, Arkansas; Greg Hinshaw,
Randolph Central School Corporation, Indiana; Bob Hunt, Chagrin Falls; Laura Kagy,
Seneca East, Ohio; Michael Paskewicz, Northview Public Schools, Michigan; Steven
Rose, Russia Local, Ohio; Chris Selle, Custer County Schools, Colorado; Maggie Shook,
Tomaston-Upton Schools, Georgia; William Skilling, Oxford Schools; John Sturock,
Allen Park Public Schools, Michigan; Andy Turgeon, Knox County, Missouri; Tom
Turrell, Byers School District, Colorado; Ann Webb, Cedar Ridge, Arkansas; and Virginia
Young, Newton Municipal School District, Mississippi.
Our colleagues at CAP provided excellent support for this paper. Carmel Martin
provided critical feedback on an earlier version of this paper, and she greatly enhanced
the fnal product. Ulrich Boser presented the original idea for this project and provided
editorial comments and research guidance throughout. Lucas Siegmund assisted with
helping us contact superintendents for interviews.
9 Center for American Progress | Parallel Lives, Different Outcomes
Appendix
TABLE 1
Twin district dataset
Descriptive statistics for 424 sets of twins from the 2009-10 school year
Higher-spending
twin districts
Lower-spending
twin districts
Mean Standard error Mean Standard error
Enrollment
3,233
students
252
3, 244
students
254
Expenditures*
$12,854
per student
$166
$11,281
per student
$134
Percent instruction 61.3% 0.18pp 61.8% 0.19pp
Percent operations 18.9% 0.14pp 18.8% 0.15pp
Percent student and sta support 8.4% 0.15pp 7.9% 0.14pp
Percent administration 11.3% 0.11pp 11.5% 0.12pp
Revenues*
$13,405
per student
$217
$12,394
per student
$169
Percent federal revenue 9.8% 0.27pp 9.8% 0.25pp
Percent state revenue 43.4% 0.85pp 47.9% 0.76pp
Percent local revenue 46.8% 0.98pp 42.3% 0.87pp
Demographics
Percent students who are eligible for free
or reduced-price lunch
38.4% 0.93pp 38.5% 0.93pp
Percent students who are limited English
procient or English language learners
2.3% 0.29pp 2.2% 0.29pp
Percent students with individualized
educational programs
13.8% 0.18pp 13.8% 0.18pp
Achievement
Achievement reading/language arts
(2009-10)
79.8% 0.56pp 79.4% 0.56pp
Achievement math (2009-10) 79.7% 0.57pp 79.0% 0.57pp
* The diferences in per-pupil expenditures and revenues are signifcantly diferent at the 5 percent level, but not the associated percentage distribu-
tions. The authors performed t-tests to compare means across the two samples (i.e., the higher- and lower-spending districts). All other compared
means were not signifcantly diferent.
Note: pp stands for percentage points.
Source: Authors calculations based on public data from the U.S. Department of Education. U.S. Department of Education, EDFacts, LEA Level Results
for State Assessments in Reading/Language Arts and Mathematics, School Years 2008-09 and 2009-10, Provisional Data, available at http://www.data.
gov/education/; National Center for Education Statistics, Local Education Agency (School District) Finance Survey (F-33) Data, available at http://nces.
ed.gov/ccd/f33agency.asp (last accessed XX FILL IN MONTH AND YEAR XX); National Center for Education Statistics, Common Core of Data, 2007-
2008, 2008-2009, 2009-2010, and 2010-2011, available at https://nces.ed.gov/ccd/. Data adjusted for diferences in cost of living using Comparable
Wage Index data from Lori Taylor at Texas A&M University. The Bush School of Government and Public Service, Texas A&M University, Extending the
NCES CWI, available at http://bush.tamu.edu/research/faculty/taylor_CWI/ (last accessed December 2013).

10 Center for American Progress | Parallel Lives, Different Outcomes
Endnotes
1 To adjust for geographic diferences in cost of living, we
adjusted total district expenditures by the Comparable
Wage Index, or CWI, from the National Center for Education
Statistics. We used the 2010 district CWI produced by Lori
Taylor at Texas A&M University. The Bush School of Govern-
ment and Public Service, Texas A&M University, Extending
the NCES CWI, available at http://bush.tamu.edu/research/
faculty/taylor_CWI/ (last accessed December 2013).
2 National Center for Education Statistics, Local Education
Agency (School District) Finance Survey (F-33), School Year
2009-10 (Fiscal Year 2010), Provisional File Version 1a, avail-
able at http://nces.ed.gov/ccd/f33agency.asp (last accessed
May 2014); U.S. Department of Education, EDFacts, LEA and
School Results for State Assessments in Reading/Language
Arts and Mathematics, School Years 2008-09, 2009-10, and
2010-11. Provisional Data. Restricted-Use Files.
3 Authors calculations based on database described in the
Methodology section on page 3 of this issue brief.
4 We had invited more than 100 district superintendents to
speak with us for this project.
5 Note that we found that productivity is not generally
related to revenues. There are districts with very large
revenue diferences that did not see commensurate gains in
achievement. Consider two twins with some of the largest
revenue diferences in our sample. Both are large suburbs
in Pennsylvania. Each served about 4,000 students, roughly
one-ffth of whom were economically disadvantaged. One
twin collected about $5,000 more per student than the
other, and both had modest gains in reading and math
profciency. At the end of the year, the districts achieved
about 80 percent profciency in reading and 85 percent in
math. We are not sure why this occurs, but we believe that
districts are bringing in their dollars and spending those
dollars in diferent years. In fact, some districts carried over
around $4,000 per student in assets. However, the nature
of the dataset does not allow us to dig any deeper into this
fnding.
6 Marguerite Roza, How current education governance dis-
torts fnancial decisionmaking. In Paul Manna and Patrick
McGuinn, eds., Education Governance for the Twenty-First
Century: Overcoming the Structural Barriers to School Reform
(Washington: Brookings Institution Press, 2013).
7 Authors calculation based on Marguerite Roza, Allocation
Anatomy: How District Policies that Deploy Resources Can
Support (or Undermine) District Reform Strategies (Seattle:
Center on Reinventing Public Education, 2008).
8 See, for example, David H. Monk, John C. Pijanowski, and
Samid Hussain, How and Where the Education Dollar Is
Spent, The Future of Children 7 (3) (1997): 5162; Susanna
Loeb, Jason Grissom, and Katharine Strunk, District Dollars:
Painting a Picture of Revenues and Expenditures in Cali-
fornias School Districts (Stanford, CA: Stanford University,
2006), available at http://cepa.stanford.edu/sites/default/
fles/5-Loeb-SACS%283-07%29%5B1%5D.pdf.
9 Louisiana Department of Education, Louisiana Believes:
Empowering Educators: Planning for Success, available at
http://www.louisianabelieves.com/docs/teacher-toolbox-
resources/empowering-educators-planning-for-success.
pdf?sfvrsn=10 (last accessed January 2014).
10 Ibid.; Louisiana Department of Education, Louisianas
Schoolwide Reform Guidance, available at http://www.
louisianabelieves.com/docs/accountability/guidance-
--schoolwide-reform.pdf?sfvrsn=2 (last accessed January
2014); Louisiana Department of Education, Managing
Risk, available at http://www.louisianabelieves.com/docs/
default-source/teacher-toolbox-resources/managing-
risk-fow-chart.pdf (last accessed April 2014); Louisiana
Department of Education, Funding Flexibility Executive
Summary, available at http://www.louisianabelieves.com/
docs/default-source/teacher-toolbox-resources/funding-
fexibility-for-districts.pdf (last accessed April 2014).
11 Louisiana Department of Education, Funding Flexibility
Executive Summary.
12 California Department of Education, Local Control Funding
Formula Overview, available at http://www.cde.ca.gov/fg/
aa/lc/lcfoverview.asp (last accessed January 2014).
13 Annenberg Institute for School Reform, Brown University,
First Steps to a Level Playing Field: An Introduction to
Student-Based Budgeting (2002).
14 George Skelton, Brown turns to Aristotle, The Los Angeles
Times, January 14, 2013; George Skelton, Voters not told
whole story, The Los Angeles Times, February 28, 2013;
George Skelton, Brown poised for big win, The Los Angeles
Times, June 3, 2013; California Secretary of State, Proposi-
tion 30: Temporary Taxes to Fund Education. Guaranteed
Local Public Safety Funding. Initiative Constitutional
Amendment, available at http://vig.cdn.sos.ca.gov/2012/
general/pdf/30-title-summ-analysis.pdf (last accessed May
2014).
15 Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary
Education, District Analysis and Review Tool (DART): Quick
Reference Guide, available at http://www.doe.mass.edu/
apa/dart/DART_ReferenceGuide.pdf (last accessed February
2014).
16 Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary
Education, Current Documents - District Review - Account-
ability - Targeted Assistance & Accountability - Massachu-
setts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education,
available at http://www.doe.mass.edu/apa/accountability/
dr/ (last accessed February 2014); Massachusetts Depart-
ment of Elementary and Secondary Education, The
Standard District Review Protocol 2014 (2013), available
at http://www.doe.mass.edu/apa/review/district/2014dr-
protocol.pdf.
17 Frantzeskos Lavdas, Stephen Broughman, and Lawrence
MacDonald, Feasibility Report: School-Level Finance
Pretest, Public School District Questionnaire. Working Paper
2008-18 (U.S. Department of Education, 2000); Stephen
Cornman and others, Improving the quality of school-
fnance data. Presentation at NCES STATS-DC 2013 Data
Conference (Washington: National Center for Education
Statistics, 2013).
18 Texas Education Agency, PEIMS Financial Standard Reports,
available at http://www.tea.state.tx.us/fnancialstandardre-
ports/ (last accessed January 2014).
19 Paul Hill and Marguerite Roza, Curing Baumols Disease:
In search of productivity gains in K-12 schooling (Seattle:
Center on Reinventing Public Education, 2010).